In circulation-type bill deposit and dispensing apparatus, it is required to collectively load or collectively unload bills. The laid-open Patent Application No. 33757/1981 discloses a circulation-type bill deposit and dispensing apparatus having such a function. Such apparatus is provided with a removable collecting storage box capable of storing bills of any denomination in addition to storage boxes for the respective denominations. It has a collective loading function wherein the collective storage box containing bills of each denomination is mounted on the body of the apparatus at the start of business. Those bills are sequentially fed out, discriminated with respect to their denomination and stored in storage boxes corresponding to the different denominations. It further has a collective unloading function wherein the bills in each different denomination storage box are fed out and stored in the collective storage box after careful examination.
Usually, in a circulation-type bill deposit and dispensing apparatus, it is required to feed bills at high speed. However, the edges of bills come in contact with fixed objects such as side walls of the feed path, which may cause a feed jam. To prevent this, the width of the feed path is increased and the bills are fed by rollers or belts. However, in this kind of bill feed mechanism, skid or side slip can easily occur in the feed path when the bills are fed out one by one from a stack of bills. In addition, it is likely that when the bills being fed at high speed are released into a free space and stacked (for example, in an escrow or a stacker), the bills tend to skid in the longitudinal direction thereof.
This skid can be restricted to some extent by the side walls of the storage box but, if the spacing between the side walls is not made large enough, jams will occur. Accordingly, the width of the storage box is made considerably larger than that of bills. Therefore, the bills fed out from such a storage box may have been shifted in the lateral direction, and when these bills are collectively loaded or unloaded, a feed jam, failure of denomination discrimination, or a stacking jam in the storage box can occur.
It is an object of the invention to provide a circulation-type bill deposit and dispensing apparatus in which feed failure and discrimination failure due to skid of the bills is prevented.